Wanting to try out my new camera properly, I volunteered to travel from the south coast of England up to Dumfries in Scotland - a round trip of around 16 hours - just to install one computer. So, the plan was two days of travelling, an hour or so of installing, and the best part of a day photographing. However, as the server ended up taking from 10am to about 4:30pm due to network problems, the following were taken during an extended lunch break while I was trying to figure out what the hell was going wrong...

As the new camera has not only a 10x optical zoom (the same as a good pair of binoculars, and better than my 8x25 binoculars I carry in my backpack) but also lots of new settings for taking landscapes, portraits, action shots, night shots etc., it might look like there are a number of near-duplicate pictures as I play around with the settings. There are also a lot of photographs of birds on a river...

It was this building that made me realise that I'd been to Dumfries about a decade or so earlier, back when I lived in Nottingham (and so, the trip was much shorter). For my 21st birthday I went with a girlfriend to a murder mystery weekend in Scotland, and on the Saturday we went into town to do some shopping. I didn't know then where we'd gone, but this time round I started to remember my way around - like going to my left would eventually lead me to a river with an interesting weir...

The problem with taking pictures of signs from the other side of the street (or bridge in this case) is waiting for the traffic to stop getting in the way. Although I quite like this one for some reason. At least there's a sense of scale I suppose.